Every day, your hands do something amazing, and most of us don’t take a moment to think about it. Picking up a cup of coffee, threading a needle, typing on a keyboard: feats of biological engineering so complex that machines have struggled to copy them. Now a team at MIT may have found a promising new way forward, and it fits around your wrist.
According to a study, ‘Hand tracking using wearable wrist imaging,’ published in Nature Electronics, researchers at MIT and the University of Southern California have created a fully integrated, wireless ultrasound imaging wristband that, when paired with an artificial intelligence algorithm, can continuously monitor arbitrary hand configurations of the five fingers and the palm in real time, with a delay of less than 120 milliseconds. The paper was led by MIT professor of mechanical engineering Xuanhe Zhao, and co-authored by Gengxi Lu, a former MIT postdoc, among others.
Why your wrist holds the key
The research is based on a beautiful insight. The tendons and muscles in your wrist act as control cables for your fingers. As lead co-author Gengxi Lu explained: “The tendons and muscles in your wrist are like strings pulling on puppets, which are your fingers. So the idea is, each time you take a picture of the state of the strings, you'll know the state of the hand.”
